14 DAY TRIAL // Andrew “Bunnie” Huang is an American hacker who’s mostly known for breaking open the original the Xbox. Now Huang has started a crowdfunding campaign on Crowd Supply along with his partner Sean “xobs” Cross that plans to make the concept of open source laptop a reality.
With most consumer products, hardware comes pre-packaged and users have actually no idea what’s going on the inside.
“You’re not supposed to open your iPhone, it’s on contract from your carrier – if you break it, you have to fix it. So we’re trying to change the trend and give people the power that they need to hack and modify their products.”
“Basically we’re giving you fully jailbroken hardware. We never put the hardware in jail. So the reason you to jailbreak the phone is because they took the hardware and locked it up. We don’ even lock it up. We give you everything – you’re a free man.”
So Huang and Cross spend over a year developing what’s being called the Novena Laptop. Since not everybody who is interested in open hardware has the necessary knowledge to build a notebook from scratch, the duo has set the crowdfunding campaign on Crowd Supply in order to sell a number of pre-build Novena systems.
So if you’re interested, you can make a pledge of $1,995 / €1,449 to reserve one of these laptops, scheduled to ship out in January 2015. For those who want to get started on this DIY project immediately, there’s the possibility to reserve a Novena board for just $500 / €363 which is expected to ship out in November 2014.
Open-source enthusiasts have a bunch of other options to choose from, including the “All-In-One Desktop” for $1,195 / €868. The kit comes with a 13.3-inch IPS display with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution, but there’s no battery and you’ll also have to bring your own mouse and keyboard to the party.
On the inside, you’ll find a 1.2GHz Freescale i.MX6 quad-core ARM Cortex A9-processor fitted with 4GB of RAM, 240GB of solid state drive, Wi-Fi, HDMI and a 45Whr battery. The default operating system is Debian Linux.
While this might not seem like much considering how much you have to pay, the presence of the Xilinx FPGA is probably what’s bumping up the price margins.
Anyway, Novena has been designed to be completely open, so adopters will find that half the space inside the laptop is empty, thus allowing them to add whatever they feel they should be adding.
